[Ronald]

I saw this briefly mentioned on the SlickStack forums, also in some Quora answers that were trashing SEO plugins lol

[Willie]

The future seems clear:

https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/docs/analyzing-entities

https://www.similarweb.com/blog/marketing/seo/google-entities/

[Donna]

There hasn’t been much chatter about it (yet) but yah, our general opinion is that schema is going to be next on the list of dead SEO tactics, the same way backlinks largely died out at least in some ranking calculations. It’s because why would Google trust what a bunch of spammy links or self-written schema markup says about a website or business when their entity knowledge graph has concluded something different?

If your schema says “this website represents a dentist from Chicago” but the social media and tax records and other references online say that actually the website is for a “restaurant from New York” than yah, I think schema becomes irrelevant.

[Cheryl]

Interesting! I haven’t really heard anyone mention this before.

[Donald]

This guy agrees btw

https://insider.whitespark.ca/p/schema-dead-google-posts-might-going-away

[Nathan]

yah Darren also had an accompanying tweet to that blog post. Pretty much exactly what I had come to believe during the past 2 years….

https://x.com/DarrenShaw_/status/1765779219362254980

[Sarah]

I no longer implement or recommend Schema for local business SEO. There used to be value in some schema markup, but not anymore.

🔹 Local business schema
You don’t need it unless your business info online is a mess and Google cannot associate your business entity with your website. 99% of businesses don’t have this problem, so there is no reason to use it. This schema has never had any SEO impact (see Joel’s quote above).

🔹 Review schema
It was amazing while it lasted, but Google doesn’t show the stars in the results for smaller sites anymore, so the party’s over.

🔹 FAQ schema
It was amazing while it lasted, but Google doesn’t show the FAQ snippet in the results for smaller sites anymore, so the party’s over.

🔹 Sameas schema
This used to be helpful to get social links on your GBP, but it’s no longer needed since you can add social links as a setting in your Google Business Profile now.

[Sandra]

do local businesses really need traditional SEO anymore?

[Tyler]

Schema is still being actively used by Google for a few niches at least… like review stars (if your domain authority is strong) or recipes and certain things but for brands and local businesses it does seem irrelevant at this point.

[Bobby]

does Reddit or Quora provide better direct traffic clicks?

[Joan]

Even if Google isn’t using it, have to remember Bing still probably will.

[Ruth]

Last year I noticed several local businesses in my client’s city ranking really well from a certain SEO agency, and they all had local business schema added to their homepage source code. When I checked Backlinks, it was almost zero links. So I’m not sure if the schema plaid a big part or not, and I haven’t checked that city lately to see if it changed after the HCU, but it was really interesting.

[Author]

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